Panel 2 – Technology and aesthetics (1)
Chair: Peter Hort
After working for 20 years in film and television, Peter Hort started teaching in 2002, and was Course Director of the Film Production BA at Westminster University from 2006 - 2019. He studied English Literature before beginning his career as an assistant film editor at the BBC. He worked as an independent drama and documentary producer for 15 years, with co-production partners including Channel 4, NDR German Television, France 2, Eurimages, and the Berlin Film Fund. He is currently working on the archive of student films at Westminster, which dates back to the 1960s.14:00 - Designing and building a ‘DIY’ open source film scanner Matthew Epler (Kinograph designer, USA)
Matthew Epler is the creator of the Kinograph project. Long ago he taught film history. Now he is a software developer by day, a maker by night, and a full-time cat dad. In 2009 a garage full of dusty film canisters was discovered in Amman, Jordan. Their contents were a mystery and the only tools available were a bathroom light and a small point-and-shoot digital camera. 12 years later, a community has formed around the idea of an affordable, easy-to-build film scanner. We call it the Kinograph. In this session, the creator of Kinograph will speak about the process that led to its creation, show the machine's current status, and discuss the importance of building communities to solve real-world problems.
14:25 - Questions/Discussion
14:40 - Students’ digital remastering of an INSAS film Gilles Bissot (INSAS, Belgium)
Gilles Bissot shares his time between his company, FilmiK, specialised in film scanning and recording, and INSAS cinema school in Brussels where he’s teaching postproduction. His 25 years of experience in the field of film and digital postproduction covers many technical aspects of production, from shooting to distribution : film and laboratory techniques, digital workflow, stop motion shooting, technical postproduction coordination, color grading, titles, film scanning and recording, etc.Since 2019, thanks to a collaboration established with CINEMATEK (Royal Cinematheque of Belgium), INSAS has begun a remasterisation program of its analog archives. We have about 50 years of graduation films and exercises that were shot on 16 mm film. This represents nearly 500 titles of short fiction or documentary films, a large part of which only benefited from 16 mm positive prints, that are not showable anymore nowadays, and SD telecine. We have created a new exercise entitled : "Digital remastering of an old INSAS film", in which each student of the image master's program is entrusted with the digital restoration (or remastering) of an old film from the school. Starting with a series of DPX images from a 2K scan of the original negative, he or she must re-calibrate the film according to a reference of the time (16 or 35 mm positive copy, video file), digitally correct the defects (to the extent of his or her knowledge, means and time available), and come up with a new digital master. This exercise imposes on the students a very focused work of grading: it is not a question here of reinterpreting the film, but of making the film visible again in digital format, in the best possible quality while respecting the choices and intentions of the authors of the original work. Our objective is not to train experts in digital restoration, we have neither the time nor the material means, but to awaken our students to the problems of preservation, restoration and distribution of films. This exercise allows them to work on images shot on film, but also to create a bridge between the young generation of students and those who have gone before them.
15:00 - Archival Pedagogy Dimitrios Latsis (Ryerson, Canada)
Dimitrios Latsis is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the School of Image Arts, Ryerson University in Toronto where he teaches in the Film and Photography Preservation and Collection Management program. He received his PhD in Film Studies from the University of Iowa and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Visual Data Curation at the Internet Archive.The Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management MA program at Ryerson University is one of only three graduate degree-level programs in North America and one of very few in the world to be housed within a major film and media production department. As such, an extensive cross-pollination has developed over the years between the teaching and practice of film archiving on the one hand, and the fiction and documentary production areas of our conservatory-style curriculum. In this presentation, I will cover some of the best practices that have fueled this virtuous circle and in particular: i) our current project to construct a comprehensive archive of physical and digital elements from student thesis films produced in the School of Image Arts during the past five decades, ii) the utilization of our in-house photochemical film and digital lab by undergraduate and graduate students, and iii) our film and non-film collections of 16mm film assembled for instructional purposes and made available to our preservation students for their internship and residency projects. As workflows, tools and course content evolve rapidly to keep pace with the digital transition, film schools are uniquely positioned to take the lead in the preservation of film heritage.